The Investment Marketing and Innovation Awards are back to reward the hard working innovative people and companies in the investment world. The awards categories cover both marketing and proposition development, as well as direct and digital marketing. They are designed to recognise and reward creativity and innovation within the sector.

Investment Week is delighted to be hosting the 25th Fund Manager of the Year Awards on Thursday 25 June ONLINE. This year's ceremony is a key part of Investment Week's 25th anniversary celebrations in 2020 and we will be presenting awards for Outstanding Fund Manager over 25 Years and Outstanding Contribution over 25 Years on the night. A flagship event for the investment industry for a quarter of a century, the Fund Manager of the Year Awards honour fund managers and groups at the top of their game who have demonstrated consistently strong performance for investors and whom the judging panel believe have the potential to continue to outperform in the future.

The Sustainable Funds to Watch series from Investment Week allows sponsors to show-case up and coming or evolving funds and managers to some of the most influential fund selectors in the UK. Both Funds to Watch Winter and Funds to Watch Autumn are two day mixed asset class conferences taking place in London. The conferences consist of a mixture of streams including funds under £250m, boardroom sessions aimed at more established groups, and quick fire presentations offered to groups by editorial direction.
This event is invitation only.

In this exclusive magazine exploring the evolution of quality and income ETF strategies, King reveals that each ETF follows an investment strategy developed by the group's in-house research team that leverages fundamental active insights to inform the factor definitions and applies portfolio construction principles to mitigate the unintended biases.

David Cumming, Aviva Investors' chief investment officer for equities, last year witnessed turbulent times for UK equities but he remains positive about the market in which he has a personal as well as a professional stake.

VT Downing Global Investors to be managed by Anthony Eaton

Downing Fund Managers has teamed up with JM Finn to launch a new thematic global equity fund – its second new offering in the space of a fortnight.

The VT Downing Global Investors fund will be managed by JM Finn investment manager Anthony Eaton, who will join Downing as investment consultant. Eaton will work with partner and head of Downing Judith Mackenzie and her team on the mandate.

The thematic offering will be run with "reduced concentration risk", Downing said, and aims to achieve capital and income growth over the long term by investing primarily in equities across global markets.

Eaton had previously run the CF JM Finn Global Opportunities fund from 2005 until it was sold to Thornbridge in August 2019. Under Eaton's management, the fund returned 10.4% compound annualised growth.

Mackenzie said the appointment of Eaton marked "another significant step in the managed growth" of Downing and "allows us to expand our boutique funds strategy".

"Our boutique strategy aims to provide a partnership to grow mandates that often get overlooked by larger houses, allowing investors access to established managers with proven track records," Mackenzie added.

"This should provide the freedom for these managers to articulate and practise successful strategies without the constraints of a larger institution and share the economic equity of success.

"We will provide a platform for Anthony to market a great mandate and we believe that the fund will have wide appeal. As an asset class, global equities provide unlimited opportunities to identify investment prospects at attractive valuations that have the potential to grow investors' capital over the long term."

On the fund, Eaton said: "We believe that events drive trends and that the dominant driver of events is going to be the expanding global middle class population.

"The needle movers within that will be the six billion population outside the West, and the Asian middle classes in particular. The strategy is to own businesses, wherever they are based, that cater to those needs and wants of this compounding homogenous marketplace."

The fund's investment objective will be to seek capital and income growth from investments identified across global equity and/or bond markets from a diversified portfolio of around 150 positions which keeps individual stock specific risk low.

JM Finn's CFO Dominic May said the firm was "delighted to enter into this arrangement to assist Downing as they develop their fund offering".